The CEO is the only person in the organisation whose job description is also a performance.
Everyone else has deliverables. The CEO has presence. They appear at the all-hands to speak about vision, at the offsite to speak about culture, and at the earnings call to speak about momentum. These are not the same speech, but they are close. What they share is an absence of operational detail, which is not an oversight. Operational detail is for the people who handle it. The CEO’s job is to make the organisation feel like it is going somewhere, preferably before anyone checks whether it is.
The compensation follows the same logic. It is not indexed to output in any way that can be cleanly measured, which is precisely why it can be set so high. A warehouse supervisor’s performance has metrics. A CEO’s performance has narrative. Narrative is harder to cap.
They are also, in most organisations, the least interrupted person in the building. Problems arrive pre-filtered, pre-framed, and accompanied by a recommended solution. What reaches the CEO is not the company as it functions. It is the company as the company would like to be understood.
